Women's Success Coach Podcast

7: Stop Worst-Case Scenario Thinking

February 14, 2023 Karen Vincent
Women's Success Coach Podcast
7: Stop Worst-Case Scenario Thinking
Show Notes Transcript

Episode Overview:

If you can’t relate to what we are talking about in today’s podcast, I know you know someone who can! Catastrophizing or worst-case scenario thinking is what is called a thought distortion because it is something we think is true, or something we think will actually happen, when in reality, there is little to no evidence that it will happen at all.

What I cover:

The difference between the logical side of your brain and the emotional side of your brain.


Why the emotional side of your brain wants you to worry all the time and how it tries to protect you.


How neural pathways are formed.


How to create new thoughts, that you believe, that will help you change your neural pathways.


Let's Take Some Action:

First, think about a specific worst-case scenario thought or pattern of thoughts that comes up for you. The more specific you can be the better. 


Next, when you think about the circumstance or situation that is causing you to have the worst-case scenario thought, is there a different thought that you think about the situation that would feel better. What is most important with this is that you have to believe the new thought. 


When your old worst-case scenario thought pops up, notice it, then tell yourself the old thought is not 100% true, and then intentionally think your new thought. Over time this new thought will become the automatic thought instead of the catastrophic thought being the default thought. 


Consistency matters with this and the more consistent you are, the faster you will see a change.





Useful Resources:

Do you worry too much, overthink, assume the worst-case scenarios, spend a lot of time focusing on negative things that have happened, or discredit positive things happening? If so, you are dealing with the human brain we have all been given and you are not alone.

The good news is, you can change this and it may not take as long as you may think! If you want a free resource that will help you examine your thinking patterns, and change those that are not serving you, grab my 5 Common Thought Distortions Guide HERE.


Let’s stay in touch:

Website: www.KarenVincentSolutions.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/karenvincentsolutions/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/KarenVincentSolutions

Twitter: https://twitter.com/KarenVCoach



Karen:

Welcome to the Women's Success Coach Podcast. A podcast created to inspire growth and to help you learn, achieve, and evolve in your life ongoing regardless of your age. I'm your host, certified coach, and licensed therapist Karen Vincent, and I'm here to guide you and provide you with concrete tips and strategies you can implement in your life. I'm also here to inspire you, challenge you, and cheer you on so that you can create the life of your dreams and beyond. If you're not someone who engages in the specific topic that I'm talking about today, I bet you know someone who does. Catastrophizing, or worst-case scenario thinking is what is called a thought distortion because it's something we think is true or something we think will actually happen, when in reality there is little to no evidence that it will happen at all. I decided to talk about this here because it's a topic that comes up most days with my one-on-one clients, so I'm sure there are plenty of people listening who could benefit from this information as well. Well, hello. I hope you're having a good week. As you heard in the introduction, in this podcast episode, I'm talking about catastrophizing, or worst-case scenario thinking. Have you ever experienced this or do you know someone who does this? No matter what is happening, the assumption is that it will turn out poorly even when there is no real evidence to support the assumption. The reason you can likely relate to this is because it's not uncommon at all. However, just because it's not uncommon does not mean that it's helpful or okay. In fact, it's almost always unhelpful, which is why I wanted to talk about this in detail. In this episode, I will explain to you why worst case scenario thinking happens, and then I will give you specific strategies you can use to change this way of thinking if that's something you are interested in doing. In doing this work for as long as I have, I found that when you understand what's happening in your brain and why certain things are happening, it becomes easier to implement strategies that can change them. As you will hear me say frequently, you have more control over your brain than you probably know. So let's start with talking about the brain. Very simplistically put, you have two parts to your brain, the part that allows you to think logically, and the emotional part of your brain. Both are important and helpful, however, when the emotional side of the brain is not managed, it can start to manage you. Let me explain a little bit more by taking us back in time. The emotional side of your brain is the part of your brain that existed many, many years ago when your ancestors were living in caves and faced with real physical danger on a regular basis. That emotional side of the brain was primitive and it had only one job, and that job was to protect people and keep them alive. That's a pretty important job, right? So it had to get really good at keeping people alive by signaling to them when there was any sort of danger, so that they could then go protect themselves by fighting, by running away, or by hiding. That's the whole fight, flight, or freeze response I'm sure you've heard. So there could be a tiger out in the woods. And the emotional or primitive part of the brain in our ancestors would signal high alert, save yourself. And when it did this, our ancestors would respond by fighting, running away, or hiding to protect themselves. Thinking about what it was like living back then, having this high alert system working at all times was necessary and very useful. So that's all good, right? But keep in mind that the other side of the brain, that logical side of the brain was not yet formed. What this means, is that if something looked like a tiger, sounded like a tiger, or even smelled like a tiger, the brain sounded its alarm,"high alert, save yourself", and then our ancestors took action. So what this looked like was there could be a big gust of wind that blew in the woods, and instead of the brain registering it as a gust of wind, it would think, Hmm, this rustling of the leaves sounds like it does when a tiger is creeping around in the woods coming to attack. And because logically it couldn't connect the noise in the woods to the gust of the wind, it would signal"high alert, save yourself", just like it would if it actually saw a tiger coming. And the same as when there was an actual tiger coming, our ancestors would then get ready to fight, or run, or hide. Next, there could be some rabbits in the woods jumping around and headed towards the cave. That primitive side of the brain would hear leaves rustling, see something approaching the cave with four legs and think, it kind of sounds like a tiger, it sort of looks like a tiger and therefore, what would it do? It would signal"high alert, save yourself". So you get the point, right? The only job of that emotional or primitive side of the brain was to look for potential danger, and when there was anything that could be considered danger, even if it was a stretch, it signaled the"high alert, save yourself" signal. Now, if we fast forward to today, most of us are not in physical danger on a regular basis. But imagine that you're driving in your car and someone runs through a stop sign and is headed directly for you. That primitive side of your brain signals"high alert, save yourself", which is what allows you to swerve or slam on the brakes without even really having time to logically think about. So it still serves a valuable role when there is a real threat of physical danger present. However, real threats of physical danger are few and far between, if at all, for most of us. In addition to not being in physical danger, most of the time we have also developed the logical side of our brain. But even with this, the emotional or primitive part of your brain still wants to protect you. But in addition to protecting you from physical danger, it also wants to protect you from things like being embarrassed, experiencing difficult emotions, loss, getting hurt emotionally and failing. And because it wants to protect you from these things, it can cause you to think about the worst case scenario of situations because it thinks that if it does this, you can somehow prepare yourself for or save yourself from that worst case scenario happening. Now, I'm not saying that's all a bad thing. I think it can be helpful to be aware of things that could go wrong and to take action to protect yourself from them. However, what happens when the primitive part of the brain revs up too much, is that it silences the logical part of the brain, or minimally makes it harder for the logical part of the brain to have a voice. This is when the primitive part of the brain starts labeling things like gusts of wind and rabbits, as tigers. That primitive part of your brain can make you believe that things that will never happen or that have a very, very small chance of happening, are real. And when it does this, it results in uncomfortable feelings of worry, anxiety, stress, or fear. And if allowed to go on too long, it will become easier and easier for your brain to take you down the path to"what if town", which in most cases does not help you. In fact, it only causes you to feel bad or worry about things that are not even happening. The more often the brain takes a walk to"what if town", the more worn that path is and the easier it is for similar thoughts to follow. While it can take on different forms, such as worrying about getting fired, worrying about a relationship ending, worrying about losing all your money, worrying about death or illness, worrying about others not liking you, worrying that you are not worthy or good enough, or worrying about failing miserably at something, it takes on this worry without any real evidence to support that the thing you're worrying about will actually happen. But it makes you believe that the likelihood of it happening is high. And when it gets loud, the logical side of your brain cannot jump in and do any fact checking or analysis of any real threat, so you just assume that whatever you're worrying about is likely to happen. So essentially you are worrying ahead of time about something that will likely never happen. And if it never happens, you've worried unnecessarily. And, if by chance it does happen, you've now worried twice instead of just at the time when it actually happens. Talk about unnecessary stress, my friend. Now, while it's kind of a bummer that this happens based on how that primitive or emotional side of your brain is wired, the good news is that it does not take a lot of time to change it so that this does not need to continue to be your default thinking pattern. To make a simplified analogy of how this works, pretend you go to bed at night and while you're sleeping, two feet of snow falls on the ground. When you wake up in the morning, you go to your front door and you look outside and you see nothing but a blanket of snow in front of your house. You decide to head out the front door and just walk through the snow. Then someone else in your house looks out the door and notices that it looks like something has been on the lawn, but they're not sure what. They think maybe the snow is drifted, maybe there was an animal outside, or maybe someone had walked to the road, but they're not really sure. However, if you went back and walked down that same path 100 times, the next person in your house headed outside would see a clearly defined path, and it would be really easy for them to take the same path since it was already cleared out and well defined. Even if they weren't sure if they wanted to go to the street or maybe down the sidewalk, they would likely take the path you made directly to the street because it would be the clearest and most defined path. Now, stick with me. Picture that path as the path of worst-case scenario thinking. The more you think about worst-case scenario situations, the more clearly defined the path becomes, and the more clearly the path becomes, the easier it is for more thoughts that resemble worst-case scenario thinking to go down the same route. So if we stick with our snow analogy, if you no longer wanted other people going down the initial path you formed, what would be the most logical way to get people to change their route? It would be to form a new path in the snow, right? So the next time you go out your front door, you go right, instead of going straight out the door. And then you do this 100 times. But consider that during the time you are creating this new path, by going down it a hundred times, more snow is falling. And because of this, the old path starts to fill in more, and now the new path, the one off to the right, becomes the path everyone wants to follow because now it becomes the clearest and most defined path. This is what is happening in your brain when you're intentional about your thinking. Instead of paths in the snow, you have neural pathways in your brain. And for simplicity's sake, these neural pathways can contain themes or thinking patterns. And the more thoughts you have that are in alignment with them, the clearer and more well defined they become, making it easier for similar thoughts to follow. So worry about a tiger becomes worry about a gust of wind, or worry about a rabbit. The actual worry can broaden, and often not in a rational or logical way to include things that could potentially resemble it, even if these things don't actually make logical sense. So let's bring this back to worst-case scenario thinking. Let's say you have a worst case scenario pathway in your brain. So imagine you're going out the door and straight to the road every time you have a worst-case scenario thought, and you want to create a pathway that includes better-case scenarios. As time goes on, you form a better-case scenario path each time you intentionally consider better-case scenarios. And this is the equivalent of going out the front door and going right, instead of going straight down that old worst-case scenario pathway. When you do this, you are telling your brain what's important, which is to not always assume the worst possible outcomes. And you are reinforcing it with your thinking by considering better-case scenarios or even the best-case scenario. And because you were giving less headspace to the worst-case scenario pathway, it starts to fill in, so to speak, and it's not so easy for those types of thoughts to appear automatically. Over time, you fill in this pathway so that it is no longer your default way of thinking. Now that may feel like a lot of information I shared and it may feel overwhelming to think about how to change your catastrophic thinking, but it's not as hard as you may think. I am going to give you some very specific examples of things that you can do that will help you create new neural pathways that will support the kind of thinking you want to have, which will impact how you feel overall, the actions you take in your life, and therefore the results that you get in your life. Okay, so as I want you to do, following all my episodes, let's take some action. All of this information will be in the show notes for you to reference as well. First, I want you to think about a specific worst-case scenario thought, or pattern of thoughts, that comes up for you. The more specific you can be, the better. Because this thought is the go straight out the front door to the street thought that causes you worry unnecessarily. Next, when you think about the circumstance or situation that is causing you to have the worst-case scenario thought, is there a different thought you can think about the situation that would feel better? What's most important with this step is that you have to believe the new thought. So if you can't believe a best-case scenario, thought, come up with a better-case thought. Then this new thought will become your go out the front door and go right to start to create a new pathway. For example, if the old worst-case scenario thought is,"I'm going to mess up during my presentation, I'm not gonna be able to answer questions that people ask me, and I'll be so embarrassed", the new thought may be,"I am well prepared, I know this topic well, and if I don't know all the answers, I will be able to get them in a matter of days". The second thought feels much better, right? Another example may be,"I'm worried something will happen and I'll get really sick or even die". Now this is another, go straight out the front door thought that can cause unnecessary worry or anxiety. A new thought may be,"I'm healthy. I do what I can do to take care of myself, and I'm going to focus on living my life to its fullest". Again, the key is that this new thought has to be something that you can believe. So if, for example, you did have some real medical concern, you may not believe the"I am healthy" part of that new thought I just shared with you. Instead, you may say,"I'm getting medical help, I'm doing what I can to take care of myself, and I'm going to focus on living my life to the fullest". In both of these instances, coming up with a new thought that you can believe is critical, but doing this alone will not prevent the old thought from continuing to pop up immediately. What has to happen next, is when your old worst-case scenario thought pops up, notice it, tell yourself the old thought is not 100% true, and then intentionally think your new thought. Every time you do this, you are going out the door, and going to the right. Over time, this new thought will become the automatic default thought instead of the catastrophic or worst-case scenario, thought being the default thought. Consistency matters with this, and the more consistent you are, the faster you will see a change. Science has proven that we all have the ability to change our brains, and this is one way you can change your brain so that it works for you instead of working against you. And as I mentioned, worst-case scenario thinking or catastrophizing is an example of a thought distortion or what's sometimes called a cognitive distortion. Thought distortions are habitual ways of thinking that are often inaccurate and focus on negative things happening. If you're interested in learning about four other common thought distortions, go to the show notes and you can grab my free guide, which will help you understand why they occur as well as what you can do to change them so that they are no longer your default way of thinking. That's a wrap. You should be proud of yourself for investing time in you, which is so critical for success and for overall life fulfillment. I look forward to having you join me for my next episode. And in the meantime, go click that subscribe button so you'll know when it's released, and you can also follow me on Instagram at Best Boss Lady Life that's at Best Boss Lady Life on Instagram. Also, remember that whatever it is that you're working on, you've got this and I'm here cheering you on.